Thursday, November 30, 2017

F what?

In Word 2007+, you can see the shortcut keys by pressing the ALT key.

Word (2002-2003) has a rarely seen "toolbar" that lets you use your mouse to perform function key actions. In addition, when you press Shift you'll see what the Shift + function key combinations do, press Ctrl and you'll see those shortcuts, and so on.

The toolbar is automatically placed at the bottom of the screen (underneath the document area; right above the status bar); like any toolbar, you can drag it and dock to it any side of the screen, or let it float. To display the Function Key Display toolbar:

Go to Tools>Customize.

Select the Toolbars tab, then check Function Key Display

Click the Close button.

Press the Ctrl, Alt, or Shift keys to see the toolbar buttons (shortcut hints) change. Click on the buttons and the appropriate action will be performed.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Is it Samuel Pepys or Robert Scoble?

Samuel Pepys:
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of daily entries from Pepys' 1660 diary at The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.

A - First, "blog" is short for Web log. It's a medium in which an author writes a journal-style Web site with provisions for readers to respond. These Web logs are becoming quite valuable in the software community for sharing ideas."

Saturday, November 25, 2017

From reports and forms

Sometimes, you may not want to go to the effort of creating a report; you just need a quick hardcopy of data.

In such cases, you can simply print the Form view of your data. However, doing so also prints the background and shading associated with the form.

If you just need a quick data reference, you probably don't want to waste the resources and time to print such a detailed view. Fortunately, Access has a feature that lets you quickly print just the data from a form or report.

To do so, view the data you want to print in the form or report.

Then, choose:

Office button>Print>Print Preview (File >Page Setup)

select the Print Data Only check box

and click OK.

Doing so hides any graphics, lines, control borders, and label controls so that the print out simply contains data.

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Customize

Change the appearance of text in Access' Zoom box

Access' Zoom box, allows you to display the contents of a text box in a dialog box for easier editing and viewing. Although viewing long expressions is more convenient in the Zoom box, it is still sometimes difficult to follow what is displayed due to the font Access uses by default.

Access 20xx allows you to change the font that the Zoom box uses. To display the Zoom box, select the text box you want to expand and press Shift+F2. Then, just click the Font button, set the options you want, and click OK. The settings you select are used whenever you display the Zoom box during your current instance of Access. However, the next time you start Access the Zoom box font settings will revert to their defaults

Monday, November 20, 2017

Visual concepts

"This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so.

The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned."

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Add-in's complete

Great news, you can now redistribute and use the PDF and XPS add-in with your Runtime solution.
The Runtime's code has not been changed. Your existing runtime solutions can now officially be distributed with the PDF and XPS add-in by chaining the .msi for PDF and XPS into your install process for your app (after the Runtime).

You may copy and distribute the object code form of the add-in listed below together and for use only with the Microsoft Office Access Runtime software, subject to the license terms accompanying the Microsoft Office Access 2007 Runtime software download:

Saturday, November 18, 2017

VBA at your own risk

"Task Panes display within a Work Pane's area. A Work Pane is created by the combination of two objects. These objects are shrouded in misery and thwart most attempts to play with them. The whole area is hidden away from the Kill Cursor invoked with CTRL+ALT+-, which changes to a hand when waved over a Work Pane.
Functions are hidden away from the macro recorder. To make it easier, if it is not in this reference, it is hidden. It is like when a spy is caught and the government disavows all knowledge of their actions.
The Task Panes are spies from Microsoft that are known to only a few objects, in these versions of Office anyway.

Warning
The author gleefully notes at this point that the human race has enough intelligence to get itself into cauldrons of boiling water that it cannot climb out of and that means you and me both!
If you like to be ultra-safe, stay away from this reference and wait for MS to hand over full functionality. You will end up crashing Word many times and you can really damage your user interface."

(Ctrl+Alt+-, can be used to remove an item from a menu. Type the shortcut and then click on a menu item)

Monday, November 13, 2017

Copy or select

As you know, you can set a form field's Locked property to Yes to prevent users from changing the underlying data. However, users are still able to select and copy data from the field, and you may not always want this to be the case. The solution is to also set the field's Enabled property to No.

Ordinarily, setting the Enabled property this way causes the field and its associated label to be difficult to read. However, when you set the Enabled property to No and the Locked property to Yes, the fields and labels look exactly as they do when they're enabled for normal entry. The difference is that users will be unable to select or copy any of the displayed data.

Friday, November 10, 2017

By Burkhard Bilger

ISBN 0-684-85010-9
Scribner 2000

About the Author

Has written for all the usual suspects: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the New York Times.

Book Description

"Bilger kicks off the tour from his hometown in Oklahoma, where he 'noodles'--thrashes a limb around in catfish-thick waters--hoping to land a fabled 80-pound monster with his bare hands. In Louisiana, he challenges the misgivings any nonenthusiast might have about cockfighting.
Even though it's illegal in most of the country, the bloodsport is thriving in the Bayou State, replete with trade magazines, well-produced venues, and American Kennel Club-worthy breeding strategies. The same passion for efficiency goes into the moonshining business, where Bilger is taken under the wing of one of the few shiners willing to lead him through his sourmash operation. A few nights later, however, Bilger is on the other side, on a raid with the local sheriff.
Squirrel-brain consumption is still popular in hamlets throughout Kentucky, even after a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine blamed a neurological disease on the dish. Bilger treats each eccentric character with a distant respect and hints at the melancholy of losing tradition, no matter how bizarre."

Quote

"tick tick tick

I'm nostril-deep in murky water, sunk to the calves in gelatinous muck.

Noodling, I know, is the fishing equivalent of a shot in the dark. For his master's thesis at Mississippi State University, a fisheries biologist named Jay Francis spent three years noodling two rivers.

All told, he caught 35 fish in 1,362 tries: 1 fish for every 39 noodles."

To "noodle" is to dangle your arm in the water until a catfish swallows your hand. The fish record catch includes one at 111 pounds.

"When clamped on your arm, catfish also have an unfortunate tendency to bear down and spin , like a sharpener on a pencil."

... "once that thing gets to flouncin' and that sandpaper gets to rubbin', it can peel your hide plumb off."